Background

114 Fifth Avenue (New York, NY)

Wells Hill represented the family and trust owners of this property in the bifurcation of the client’s existing fee simple ownership into a fee and leasehold. The newly created ground lease was marketed, negotiated and closed by Wells Hill on the owner’s behalf with a third-party investor/operator as lessee. A critical aspect of maximizing value is the design of a marketing process that generates the most competitive bidding environment for that particular real estate transaction. Certain transactions warrant exposing an offering to as many bidders as possible in order to capture the outlier. Other, often more complicated, transactions benefit from a limited, more exclusive marketing process necessary to motivate the few most-qualified counter-parties to commit the time and resources to underwrite the opportunity. In this case, the result of a discreet, “off-market” process was the selection of a joint venture between L&L Holding Company and Lubert-Adler to be the lessee. As always, Wells Hill led the negotiation of the documentation through closing of the transaction. Additionally, in a subsequent transaction, the firm arranged an increase of the existing financing on the fee interest subject to the aforementioned lease.